The PKK was founded in a remote village teashop by then university graduate Abdullah Öcalan and a few co-con-spirators in 1978. Its declared goal was to liberate by armed struggle an independent, united Kurdistan for all the 25-30 million Kurds of the Middle East. Having failed to create an independent state, it now says it has abandoned that goal. It remains, however, a large, well-financed, highly organised and battle-hardened entity, with several thou-sand men and women under arms, millions of Kurdish sympathisers in Turkey, long-established bases, including a main one in Iraq, apparently jointly-run parties in Iran, Iraq and Syria and deep-rooted support networks in Eu-rope. As a PKK leader put it, “the PKK started its strug-gle at the point where the question was ‘is there a Kurdish people or not?’ Now what’s being discussed is how the Kurdish problem should be solved”.48
Turkey captured the PKK’s leader, Abdullah Öcalan, in 1999; cut most of its links to Syria, Iran, Greece and other countries that in the 1980s and 1990s gave it support or safe haven; won designation of it as a terrorist organisa-tion over the past decade by the U.S., the EU and most European countries, as well as listing by Washington of several leaders as significant drugs traffickers; and, since 2007, added to its vast superiority in men and equipment a live feed of U.S. intelligence on the PKK mountain bases along the Iraqi border.
Yet, the state has been unable to crush the organisation.
Even if it may have been militarily more powerful in the 1990s,49 the AKP failure to implement the Democratic Opening may have actually strengthened the PKK’s grip on the Kurdish movement’s imagination.50 As a long-time outside analyst of the PKK put it, “the recognition of PKK authority is much more widespread than I have ever
48Crisis Group written interview, Sabri Ok, PKK/KCK leader, 24 November 2011.
49“They ran Kurdistan in 1991-1994. A bird couldn’t fly with-out their permission. They had courts, for real. What they have now is just a kind of manipulation, perhaps they are truly dom-inant in just one or two places”. Crisis Group interview, Zeynel Abidin Kızılyaprak, Turkish Kurd intellectual, Istanbul, April 2012.
50“They seem as strong as ever, there is a feeling that other av-enues have been closed. After the Opening failed, there was a sense of, ‘well of course’ …. What’s so upsetting is that the Turkish state has such an insistence that the PKK controls eve-ry single Kurd in the counteve-ry, which is also what the PKK wants to have people believe, even though it isn’t true. This is a very unproductive perception of the conflict, but everyone be-lieves it”. Crisis Group interview, U.S. researcher on Kurdish language and politics, Istanbul, May 2012.
seen … it has a better base than before … People see the PKK as the main group representing the Kurds. Even if they don’t like the PKK, they recognise that it in effect exerts authority over the region and Kurdish politics”.51 Another believes the recent offensives are its attempt to prove that it is the necessary party to any settlement.52 Sabri Ok, a member of the KCK Executive Committee, put it this way:
Our [the Kurdish movement’s] military goal is not to beat the Turkish army or state. We are not dreamers.
Our military goal is to show the Turkish state and mil-itary that they can’t play with the Kurdish people’s will and honour any more as they have in the past, that [the Kurdish people] is not defenceless against the policy of denial and rejection and war, and that it has a natu-ral right to self defence …. The PKK has announced several unilateral ceasefires, lasting for about five years of AKP’s nine years in power. AKP has used this op-portunity to strengthen itself. But it didn’t use this strength for a solution, but to try to break the will of the Kurdish people and to destroy our movement.53 A. THE ORGANISATION
The Kurdish movement in Turkey has spawned a bewil-dering alphabet soup of entities.54 The most prominent is now technically the KCK, which emerged from PKK-led congresses in northern Iraq in 2005-2007. It views itself as a “system”, not an “organisation”,55 and its constitution-like charter talks about “KCK citizens … anyone who is
51Crisis Group interview, Aliza Marcus, expert on the PKK, Istanbul, May 2012.
52“The PKK knows that they can’t win militarily but hopes at-trition will force Turkey back to the negotiating table. They’ve adapted their tactics, using much more varied means, and the Turkish side is struggling to keep up”. Crisis Group telephone interview, Gareth Jenkins, expert on Turkish security matters, August 2012.
53Crisis Group written interview, 24 November 2011.
54Turkey’s Kurdish movement’s legal parties, for instance, have been successively known by their acronyms HEP, DEP, HADEP, DEHAP, DTP and BDP. The PKK has called itself ERNK, KADEK, Kongra Gel and KKK; currently it prefers KCK and perhaps HDP too. Its military wing, now HPG, was previously ARGK. The movement has changed names after the frequent closure of its newspapers, TV stations, parties or asso-ciations to avoid members being listed and jailed as terrorists, to rebrand itself after an ideological shift, or to mark the occa-sional new alliance with left-wing factions. “Despite all the changes of name, which were always proclaimed as new begin-nings and promised democratic structures, there were no signif-icant changes in organisation and personnel”. Protection of the Constitution Report 2010, German interior ministry, Berlin, 2011.
55The charter, proclaimed in March 2005, is in Turkish at http://
bit.ly/Qf6eI3.
born in Kurdistan, lives there or is bound to the KCK”.
The armed insurgents, known as “People’s Defence Forc-es”, are an integral part of the KCK.56
The name PKK has, however, endured, used by both sym-pathisers and opponents to refer to Öcalan’s dominant, core cadres.57 “After the PKK’s shift to KCK, we are now witnessing the emergence of a new name, HDP [Halkların Demokratik Kongresi, Congress of Democratic Peoples]”, said a European counter-terrorism officer, “but under-neath, we always find exactly the same organisation, the same associations”.58 Indeed, the most common appella-tion for the group cuts through the PKK’s self-woven tangle of names and entities: the Turkish word örgüt (“the organisation”).
The KCK, therefore, overlaps broadly with the PKK, with the latter’s leaders sometimes using the terms interchange-ably.59 It is both more than simply the PKK’s urban, civil-ian wing, but less than an umbrella body that integrates the whole Kurdish movement.60 The leadership’s strategies may in fact include keeping distinctions murky between the KCK, the KCK’s various subsidiary armed, “judicial”, and “legislative” groups, the PKK and legal groups like the BDP and Europe-based associations. Outsiders are left guessing whether the entities are distinct. Perhaps re-ality was best reflected in Brussels, where the BDP and
56According to the KCK charter, Article 14/4, “The People’s Defence Forces are autonomous within the KCK system … re-sponsible for protecting the basic rights and freedoms of the Kurdistan people, to protect the KCK Leader’s life and freedom
… within the parameters of legitimate defence”. Article 43 adds that the executive committee appoints members of the au-tonomous People’s Defence Forces command and charges the command with working according to the political will of the
“Democratic Society of Confederalism Leader”, Öcalan and the political will of the KCK’s Kongra Gel legislature.
57Sympathisers use the Kurdish pronunciation Pe-Ke-Ke; most others in Turkey use the Turkish version, Pe-Ka-Ka.
58Crisis Group interview, Brussels, June 2012.
59For instance, Article 36 of the KCK charter states: “The PKK is not a classical political party …. It is the ideological force of the KCK system …. Every PKK cadre within the KCK system is bound to the PKK formation in ideological, moral, philo-sophical, organisational and everyday life points of reference”.
60“Not everyone in KCK is PKK. The PKK is more narrow.
But they are so overlapping. They have to find jobs for all their people, it’s a growing movement!”, Crisis Group interview, Sezgin Tanrıkulu, CHP deputy chairman, Ankara, July 2012.
“The KCK is an umbrella political structure, a transnational en-tity. But the U.S., for instance, hasn’t moved to designate it [as a terrorist group]. It’s a problematic organisation, and it’s a gray zone on ground level. I suspect that some [KCK people]
can be very far removed [from the PKK]. In a political cause, the people themselves may be non-violent, but if you trace up the lines [you find the armed group]”. Crisis Group interview, Western diplomat, Ankara, July 2012.
the pro-PKK Roj television offices had different addresses on different streets – but joined up at the back through their gardens.61
Under Öcalan’s overarching leadership, the KCK is head-ed by his number two, Murat Karayılan, a Kurd from Tur-key. He leads the KCK Executive Committee, in whose name major policy statements are made from his base in the Qandil mountains of northern Iraq. The KCK includes a legislature (the Kongra Gel, People’s Congress), headed by Remzi Kartal, another Kurd from Turkey, who is a po-litical refugee in Belgium);62 an executive, including the
“People’s Defence Forces” (Hêzên Parastina Gel, HPG), which is run from the Qandils by Bahoz Erdal (a Syrian Kurd, born as Fahman Hussain); and a judiciary, headed by Sait Avdi, an Iranian Kurd.63
The top men in the PKK’s current executive committee are also the three top names in the KCK’s twelve-person executive committee: Öcalan, Karayılan and PKK co-founder and former insurgent forces chief Cemil Bayık.
The KCK may also offer former PKK militants, most of them released from jail, a network through which they have the chance to become politically active in Turkey.64 If KCK institutions seem secretive, the chief of its legisla-ture says, it is because “we’re a revolutionary movement, and there’s a war going on, so we don’t have public meeting times”.65
61“After raiding these offices in March 2010, security services became convinced that this is all one organisation”. Crisis Group interview, European diplomat, Ankara, July 2012.
62Kongra Gel has a membership of 300 leading personalities chosen in elections every two years from Kurdish communities, associations and business groups in the four main countries where Kurds are native and the diaspora. Crisis Group inter-view, Remzi Kartal, exiled Kurdish movement leader, Brussels, June 2012.
63For a detailed overview from a Turkish perspective, see Atilla Sandıklı, “KCK Terör Örgütünün Yapısı ve Faaliyetleri [The KCK Terror Organisation’s Structure and Activities]”, Wise Men Centre for Strategic Studies (BILGESAM), 15 December 2012, http://bit.ly/Ns4UiM.
64“Theoretically they are civilians, not directly involved in armed struggle. They are not necessarily sent from the moun-tain. There were hundreds, thousands of PKK released from jail after Öcalan’s capture in 1999. They wanted to stay involved, but bringing them to the mountains wasn’t practical, and any-way, the rebel war was suspended at that time. Öcalan and the Qandil leadership came up with the idea of having these people go to the cities and get involved in legal activities. This way, the PKK kept these supporters engaged and had a new way to maintain influence over non-violent Kurdish activism”. Crisis Group interview, Aliza Marcus, expert on the PKK, Istanbul, May 2012.
65Crisis Group interview, Remzi Kartal, exiled Kurdish move-ment leader, Brussels, June 2012.
One other significant group – in theory autonomous – is the Brussels-based KNK (Kurdistan National Congress), a lobbying group of exiles, the PKK and pro-PKK parties in all Kurdish-populated regions of the Middle East.
Headed by Tahir Kemalizadeh, an Iranian Kurd, it aims to unite Kurds and focus international attention on human rights violations against them. Its ambition is for the Kurd-ish movement to become the equivalent of South Africa’s African National Congress (ANC), which moved from terrorism to government.66 The KNK tries to balance its membership: 60 per cent independent figures, 40 per cent political parties; and roughly 30 per cent Turkish Kurds, 25 per cent Iraqi Kurds, 20 per cent Iranian Kurds, 15 per cent Syrian Kurds and 10 per cent diaspora Kurds.67 Nev-ertheless, the rhetoric of the supposedly separate KNK is hard to distinguish from that of PKK/KCK groups.68 B. THE LEADERSHIP
Öcalan built the PKK into a resilient group through armed insurgency, ideological fervour, terrorist attacks on civil-ians and liquidation of its internal dissidents.69 In the or-ganisation’s literature, and even when Öcalan writes about himself, his name often metamorphoses into the word
66An ANC activist, Judge Essa Moosa, attending a Kurdish movement meeting in the European Parliament in December 2011, spoke of comparisons between the causes, noting that a South African solution became possible when the former gov-ernment unilaterally unbanned the ANC, and called on the Turkish government to “cross the Rubicon”. “The KNK is like the ANC in the past; the ANC attends our congresses, and a KNK delegation from KNK went to South Africa with BDP”.
Crisis Group interview, pro-PKK Kurdish exile from Turkey, London, June 2012.
67Crisis Group interview, pro-PKK activist, Brussels, Decem-ber 2011.
68KNK President Tahir Kemalizadeh told pro-PKK Roj TV that
“Kurdistan is one country, and the people of Kurdistan are one nation and they must reunite … if in north [Turkish] Kurdistan there is progress and it can achieve its freedom, this freedom will be extended to all parts of Kurdistan. But if the Kurds are defeated there, then it is like separating the head from the body, and the Kurds will be defeated and paralysed in the other parts”. “Kurdish National Congress chairman interviewed on pan-Kurdish strategy”, BBC Monitoring International Reports, 14 June 2010.
69A reporter who interviewed Öcalan in the early 1990s said he was paranoid and reminded him of Stalin, “[a man who] made clear that months and months of indoctrination were far more important than learning basic guerrilla-warfare tactics … [say-ing] we can afford to lose 70 per cent of PKK recruits on the battlefield within a year …. This son of a despised and failed peasant father shared the single-minded, blinkered devotion to violence I’d learned to identify over the years as a Middle East-ern cancer”. Jonathan C. Randal, After Such Knowledge, What Forgiveness? My encounters with Kurdistan (Boulder, 1998), p. 238.
“Leadership”. He remains the object of extraordinary de-votion to his followers, despite a lingering culture of fear.70 In June 2012, one burned himself to death on a hilltop look-ing out towards his prison island of İmralı, and at least six others have killed themselves in similar fashion demanding his freedom. One of the only messages he has sent from prison in the past year is to his supporters not to kill them-selves or conduct hunger strikes to win his freedom.71 Öcalan certainly views the negotiations with the govern-ment as an opportunity to end his imprisongovern-ment.72 Still, thirteen years of jail and the 1,300 books that have been delivered to the small cell where he is alone 23 hours a day appear to have softened his approach.73 His dense phil-osophical style survives in recent writings – a typical chapter discusses “Ideological identity and time-space conditions of the new development in civilisation” – but a European supporter says:
His language reflects strongly the rich historic and cul-tural heritage of the Kurds and the power of their lan-guage …. It was quite amazing to hear him [in the early 1990s] speaking often two-three hours straight and with thousands of Kurds listening to him. Öcalan and the Kurdish movement have turned against the narrow-minded concept of nationalism and the nation state and
70“I worked alongside him for one year. Öcalan woke us up, united the Kurds …. The PKK is not an organisation. It became a people”. Crisis Group interview, former PKK insurgent, Brussels, June 2012. “Whether you agree with him or not, he has a huge influence over Kurds from Turkey. If he called peo-ple to Trafalgar Square, not one would stay at home”. Crisis Group interview, former leader of the UK’s Turkish-origin Kurdish community, London, June 2012. “Internal political op-position is almost non-existent. There’s a feeling that ‘He’ is watching …. If you are criticised by the PKK, that means your life is under threat. People keep quiet … before the PKK starts talking about democracy, democratic autonomy, etc., they should apply it to themselves”. Crisis Group interview, Ümit Fırat, Turkish Kurd intellectual, Istanbul, May 2012.
71Another seven tried to burn themselves to death and survived.
Crisis Group interview, Öcalan lawyer, June 2012.
72“My own position is of strategic importance. [A settlement]
has a limited chance of implementation without Öcalan … it is necessary that I be released on the basis of a defence presented by me to [my proposed] Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
I must be enabled to [communicate with and] prepare all circles linked to the Kurds, especially the PKK, for the democratic so-lution …. There should be support to meet various needs, in-cluding and especially that of [my future place of residence]”.
Öcalan, Prison Writings III, op. cit., p. 104.
73According to Cevat Oneş, former deputy undersecretary of Turkey’s National Intelligence Organisation, “he reads nonstop, mostly philosophy but also other subjects. He has developed an almost utopian outlook”. Cited in Marc Champion and Ayla Albayrak, “Jailed Kurd Leader at Conflict’s Core”, Wall Street Journal, 20 October 2011.
are looking for … a democratic Middle East in which the Kurds are able to freely articulate their own cul-tural and political identity …. Debates in the national and international media are largely dominated by PKK
“terrorism” and not by what Öcalan and the Kurdish movement may be able to contribute to a just political and constructive solution to the long-standing, unre-solved Kurdish question.74
Öcalan was a key player in the 2005-2011 Oslo Process, and his supporters claim he is still the man who can make a peace deal work.75 If he should die in prison, it would likely be much harder to make any future deal stick.76 Dur-ing the talks, he canvassed the various constituencies: the diaspora, PKK fighters and jailed PKK members in Tur-key.77 He authorised the last draft deal in May 2011, known as the “three protocols”. He appears to have the loyalty of Karayılan, the KCK president.78 The legal BDP’s leader, Selahettin Demirtaş, believes that Öcalan should be the negotiator with the state and allowed full communication with the PKK, in other words to reestab-lish his authority over the organisation.79
But Öcalan’s grip on his group appears to be slipping. On at least three recent occasions, hard-to-explain PKK vio-lence and mutual misjudgements have tripped up the
gov-74Crisis Group interview, Estella Schmid, Peace in Kurdistan Campaign activist, London, April 2012.
75“Öcalan is the last chance for Turkey. He has power over the movement and people. He can persuade them”. Crisis Group interview, Remzi Kartal, exiled Kurdish movement leader, Brus-sels, June 2012.
76“If Öcalan dies in jail, people are going to say it was
76“If Öcalan dies in jail, people are going to say it was